Familiarity with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnhelps viewers understand how Ray plays with concepts of race and gender. Huck, for example, goes undercover as a woman. It's interesting how stainless steel erases color differences.
"Sarah Williams" (2018)
Jim kneels behind Huck.
"Sarah Williams" (Partial view, 2018)
Would you believe Huck and Jim were supposed to be part of a fountain standing in front of the Whitney Museum downtown?
Other enigmatic works aren't quite as charged with meaning.
Reviving the reputation of a self-taught 19th-century artist--even one as talented as Homer--is tricky business nowadays. He mostly depicts African Americans in subservient positions while strapping white guys come to the rescue a lot. As much as the Fox News crowd misses it, that America has long vanished while Homer's work endures because of its undeniable beauty.
"Dressing for the Carnival" (1877)
"The Life Line" (1884)
Winslow never married. He exposes a lot of male flesh in his work. As Mary Louise Parker observed so memorably in Longtime Companion, "you tell me."
"Undertow" (1886)
"The Gulf Stream" detail (1906)
It irritated Homer that people thought this young hunter was drowning this buck. The truth is just as cruel: both paintings depict a common practice: dogs hounded deer into water where it was easier to shoot them because of their decreased mobility.
"Hound and Hunter" (1892)
"An October Day" (Partial, 1889)
Homer's smaller watercolors are more appealing if less ambitious. Painted mostly in the Caribbean and Florida, they have a relaxed vibe that accompanies warmer weather.
Bourgeois turned away from painting early in her career. But there's no denying her subconscious found expression on canvas as easily as in her sculpture and installations.
This thought-provoking exhibit educates clueless visitors like me about the dangers of judging art on the basis of its beauty alone. What looks from its title to be an indictment of slavery was also widely reproduced so members of the 19th-century bourgeoisie could display their woke bonafides without having to do the hard work of actually dismantling the systems that perpetuate racism.
"Why Born Enslaved!" by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1873)
Kehinde Wiley's homage to the same statue depicts how little has changed by choosing a Los Angeles Laker as his model in a sly reference to the way professional sports continues to enslave African-American men. Watch "Winning Time," HBO's hugely entertaining account of how Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Spencer Haywood and others dominated basketball in the 1980s under the control of lily white management and coaching if you're skeptical.
"After La Negresse, 1872" by Kehinde Wiley (2006)
Here, a French artist inscribes his bust of a boy with a racial epithet used by French colonialists to identify his African ethnicity. The artwork also serves as a corollary to phrenology, the then fashionable "science" that used race, facial characteristics and skull shape to categorize individuals.
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